Fortnightly - smar gridhttp://www.fortnightly.com/tags/smar-grid
enToward a Self-healing Smart Gridhttp://www.fortnightly.com/fortnightly/2013/08/toward-self-healing-smart-grid
<div class="field field-name-field-import-deck field-type-text-long field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Deck:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Advanced distribution management technology promises to revolutionize operations.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-import-byline field-type-text-long field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Byline:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Dick DeBlasio</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-import-bio field-type-text-long field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Author Bio:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><b>Dick DeBlasio</b> is chief engineer with the <span class="s2">National Renewable Energy Laboratory (<a href="http://www.nrel.gov/" target="_blank">http://www.nrel.gov/</a>)</span>. Additionally, he chairs the <span class="s2">IEEE SCC21 Standards Coordinating Committee</span> (<a href="http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc21/" target="_blank">http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc21/</a>) on Fuel Cells, Photovoltaics, Dispersed Generation, and Energy Storage, which sponsors and leads the family of standards for IEEE 1547 and IEEE 2030. Also he’s a member of the IEEE Standards Board and past member of the IEEE Standards Association Board of Governors.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-import-volume field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Magazine Volume:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Fortnightly Magazine - August 2013</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The notion of a self-healing smart grid is compelling – even to the president.</p>
<p>“America’s energy sector is just one part of an aging infrastructure badly in need of repair,” President Obama said <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-union-address">http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-...</a> in his Feb. 12, 2013, State of the Union address to Congress. “Ask any CEO where they’d rather locate and hire – a country with deteriorating roads and bridges, or one with high-speed rail and Internet; high-tech schools; self-healing power grids.” </p>
<p>But just as the self-healing grid is only one component in a broad vision of national economic vitality that remains very much under construction, the self-healing grid itself is a still-coalescing vision. The enabling elements are in development today.</p>
<p>One aspect of that evolution is a standardized definition of what’s meant by the term, “self-healing” grid.</p>
<p>Most of the world’s stakeholders can agree on some capabilities and characteristics: a grid that’s designed to sense issues and automatically respond to them; a grid that’s designed to avert, confine and reduce harm; a grid that’s designed to protect power, infrastructure, and data end-to-end, from the point of power generation to its consumption; and a grid that’s designed to anticipate and adapt to natural disturbances and disasters, as well as nuisance tampering and sophisticated rogue compromise. </p>
<p>How might those capabilities be stitched together to create a self-healing smart grid? First, impending problems must be recognized in timely fashion. Second, the grid would need the ability to reconfigure power and information flow around equipment in order to reduce impact and set into motion a quick, coordinated response. Third, loss of service must be minimized.</p>
<p>From such a conversation emerges a clear requirement. A self-healing grid is more than a matter of protecting equipment; it’s about protecting people, too. So, for example, where automated substations and microgrids are good and important steps forward, the cybersecurity side – protecting ratepayers and utilities from information theft and fraud – must also be integrated into system-level planning toward the self-healing smart grid.</p>
<h4>Getting There From Here</h4>
<p>Building blocks of the self-healing grid are taking shape.</p>
<p>Physical security of electrical facilities has always been a concern in grid security and, of course, remains so in evolution of the smart grid. Introducing two-way communications and control across the electricity-delivery facility introduces both new opportunities and new threats to grid security.</p>
<p>For example, the developing smart grid would enable greater utilization of microgrids, as it figures to allow the transition of a microgrid’s operation relative to the traditional grid to be more precisely synchronized. The benefits of microgrids are becoming better understood and capabilities are maturing. A microgrid concentrates various distributed-generation technologies – diesel, fuel cells, natural-gas-fired turbines and microturbines, photovoltaic arrays, solar-thermal stations, wind turbines, and other resources. That cluster of power can be used in different ways. Sensing a drop in voltage in a particular power sector, the microgrid could be configured to maintain service to critical users – hospitals or emergency services, for example – while the traditional grid is closed off so as to limit the damage of a security breach, period of unreliability, or another abnormal condition. </p>
<p>In this light, deployment of advanced distribution management systems (ADMS), advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and other information and communications technologies (ICT) across the grid are necessary underpinnings of the self-healing grid infrastructure. But even those independent capabilities aren’t enough; end-to-end integration and strategies are needed to enable the grid to automatically do anything to rectify the situation, such as adjust the voltage limits on transformers or adjust applications. </p>
<p>Most utilities already have recovery plans for control centers with regard to natural phenomena that cause catastrophic situations. But they’ve only begun exploring a frontier of development – implementing policies and automated techniques for adapting to the wide scope of issues that might imperil the smart grid. For example, how and what countermeasures are to be implemented in a given scenario? How are instances of cyber invasion handled versus issues brought about by natural causes? How are various issues addressed depending on the seriousness of their potential effect on organizational operations, assets, or individuals?</p>
<p>The self-healing grid ultimately must be able to think intelligently for itself and act efficiently on its own, and that conveys the requirement for wide-scale implementation of digitized systems with sensors and controls that have pre-programmed strategies. </p>
<p>And, of course, system-level planning is mandatory. This is where standards development is so important to smart-grid planners and engineers. For example, IEEE 2030 “Guide for Smart Grid Interoperability of Energy Technology and Information Technology Operation with the Electric Power System (EPS), End-Use Applications, and Loads” – published in 2011 – includes a smart grid reference model, which provides an interrogation methodology to determine smart-grid vulnerabilities and how to configure interfaces accordingly.</p>
<h4>Policy Gap</h4>
<p>In the United States, the reliability of the wholesale power and transmission system rests with the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC). In recent times, NERC has become more involved with writing requirements, too, for substations and the distribution system, as those requirements pertain to transmission. It’s unclear, though, which regulatory entity in the United States would have responsibility for enforcing requirements related to a self-healing smart grid, which are pervasive throughout the whole infrastructure.</p>
<p>What is clear, however, is that NERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), state public utility commissions, and other agencies to this point have failed to exert sufficient pressure on utilities to define their roadmaps toward a self-healing smart grid. There is effectively no authoritative force pushing the concept. As more of our economy and social well being grow entwined with the two-way flow of power and information across a reliable and secure smart grid, a self-healing capability will become increasingly important to national interests. </p>
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<div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div>
<div class="field-items">
<a href="/tags/infrastructure">Infrastructure</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/obama">Obama</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/self-healing">self-healing</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/power">power</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/data">data</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/generation">generation</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/smar-grid">smar grid</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/automated-substation">automated substation</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/microgrid">Microgrid</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/cybersecurity">cybersecurity</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/security">Security</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/diesel">diesel</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/fuel-cell">fuel cell</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/gas-fired">Gas-fired</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/turbine">turbine</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/microturbine">microturbine</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/photovoltaic">Photovoltaic</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/solar-therma">solar-therma</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/wind">Wind</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/advanced-distribution-management">advanced distribution management</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/adms">ADMS</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/advanced-metering-infrastructure">Advanced metering infrastructure</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/ami">AMI</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/ieee">IEEE</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/north-american-electric-reliability-corp">North American electric Reliability Corp</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/nerc">NERC</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/federal-energy-regulatory-commission">Federal Energy Regulatory Commission</a><span class="pur_comma">, </span><a href="/tags/ferc">FERC</a> </div>
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Wed, 31 Jul 2013 20:16:07 +0000meacott16690 at http://www.fortnightly.com